{"id":58188,"date":"2026-08-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/?p=58188"},"modified":"2026-08-08T19:55:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:55:17","slug":"a-world-cup-an-old-wound-whitening-in-latin-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/a-world-cup-an-old-wound-whitening-in-latin-america\/","title":{"rendered":"A World Cup, an old wound: \u201cwhitening\u201d in Latin America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Whitening, understood as the systematic attempt to \u201cwhiten\u201d society through European immigration, racial hierarchy, and the marginalization of Indigenous and African identities, returned to the international debate this year. During the 2026 FIFA World Cup, racist insults against Kylian Mbapp\u00e9\u2014including those made by Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla, who called him a \u201ccolonized Cameroonian pretending to be French<\/a>\u201d\u2014controversies involving Argentine fans and players, and Javier Milei\u2019s vote alongside the United States and Israel against a UN resolution on the transatlantic slave trade reignited an old question: why does Argentina continue to imagine itself as an essentially European nation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer goes beyond Argentina. From Mexico to the Southern Cone, Latin American republics inherited colonial ideas that associated whiteness with civilization and progress. These ideas were translated into immigration policies, military campaigns, and national narratives that redefined the identity of the new states. Argentina was the most fully developed expression of this project, but it was far from the only one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Argentina and the construction of a European nation<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This path was not inevitable. At the Congress of Tucum\u00e1n in 1816, different projects coexisted. Belgrano proposed a constitutional monarchy with a descendant of the Incas\u2014the Inca Plan\u2014supported by San Mart\u00edn and G\u00fcemes but rejected by the Buenos Aires elite. The Declaration of Independence was also published in Quechua and Aymara. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, these possibilities gave way to a project that identified progress with Europeanization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intellectual foundations were laid out in two key works. In Facundo<\/em> (1845), Sarmiento turned the opposition between \u201ccivilization and barbarism\u201d into the central axis of his interpretation of the country<\/a>: European immigration represented civilization, while Indigenous societies represented backwardness. Alberdi summarized this vision with the phrase \u201cto govern is to populate\u201d\u2014that is, to attract European immigrants in order to transform the country’s demographics. Positivism later reinforced, throughout much of Latin America, this association between Europeanization and modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Argentina took this project further than almost any other country in the region. Slavery existed under Spanish rule\u2014between 100,000 and 150,000 Africans were enslaved, a figure far lower than in Brazil or Cuba\u2014but early abolition did not lead to an inclusive society. The elites promoted whitening through military expansion into Indigenous territories, mass European immigration, and a national memory that progressively relegated Indigenous and Afro-Argentine people to the margins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most revealing episode was the Conquest of the Desert (1878\u20131885), led by Julio Argentino Roca. Presented as a civilizing mission into supposedly \u201cempty\u201d territories, it resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of Mapuche, Tehuelche, Ranquel and other peoples<\/a>, while incorporating nearly fifteen million hectares of land that were subsequently distributed among large landowners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Immigration and Colonization Law of 1876 complemented the military conquest. Between 1857 and 1940, Argentina received more than 6.6 million immigrants, primarily Italians and Spaniards. By 1914, nearly 30% of its inhabitants had been born abroad, while approximately 80% of the population of Buenos Aires was either foreign-born or the child of immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selective memory was also decisive. At the end of the eighteenth century, Afro-Argentines represented between 25% and 30% of the population of Buenos Aires and played a central role in the colonial economy and the wars of independence. War-related mortality, epidemics, racial mixing, and changes in census practices contributed to their disappearance from the official narrative. Indigenous peoples were reduced to a distant past despite their continued presence. Argentina thus came to celebrate itself as \u201cthe Europe of South America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A project shared throughout Latin America<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Argentina was the most successful case, but it was not an isolated one. Uruguay cultivated the image of \u201cthe Switzerland of America.\u201d Paraguay, following the War of the Triple Alliance (1864\u20131870), also promoted European immigration as a means of \u201cnational regeneration\u201d; Amarilla\u2019s remarks demonstrate the persistence of this imaginary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brazil offers the most revealing contrast. It received approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans, nearly 40% of the entire transatlantic slave trade. Following abolition in 1888, intellectuals such as Jo\u00e3o Batista de Lacerda argued that racial mixing combined with European immigration would \u201cwhiten\u201d the population within a few generations. A 1890 decree restricted Asian and African immigration while encouraging European immigration; between 1884 and 1939, more than four million European immigrants arrived. Even so, Black and mixed-race Brazilians are a majority today, and studies by IBGE and IPEA continue to show profound racial inequalities in income, education, and life expectancy. The ideal of whiteness survived even where it did not materialize demographically<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cuba offers another counterpoint. The 1959 Revolution abolished legal segregation and declared racism incompatible with socialism, but the leadership remained disproportionately white. After 1991, the Special Period frequently benefited white Cubans, who had greater access to remittances and tourism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar variations appeared throughout the region. In Bolivia and Peru, Creole elites retained power despite Indigenous majorities. In Mexico, mestizaje became the foundation of national identity, but it involved more assimilation than Indigenous autonomy. In Guatemala, exclusion culminated in campaigns described by the UN as genocide. And in the Dominican Republic, Trujillo took anti-Black nationalism to a violent extreme with the 1937 Parsley Massacre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A continuing colonial legacy<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The consequences extended beyond demographics. Education and state institutions were organized according to European models, Spanish and Portuguese became languages of power, and dozens of Indigenous languages were marginalized. Political independence did not mean cultural decolonization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cold War reinforced these structures. The dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay presented themselves as defenders of Western civilization, while Indigenous and agrarian demands were portrayed as security threats. With democratization and reforms at the end of the twentieth century, institutions changed more rapidly than social hierarchies: wealth and power remained concentrated among elites of European descent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The controversies surrounding the World Cup revealed nothing new. They reminded us that, more than two centuries after independence, Latin America is still debating who fully belongs to the nation. As An\u00edbal Quijano argued, coloniality did not end with colonialism: it survived independence and continues to organize relations of power. That is the most enduring legacy of whitening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The racist controversies at the World Cup reignited an old debate: how the ideal of \u201cwhitening\u201d shaped national identity in Argentina and much of Latin America and continues to shape its inequalities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":407,"featured_media":58196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16803,16839,16919,16733],"tags":[15635],"gps":[],"class_list":["post-58188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-racismo-en","category-historia-en","category-futbol-en","category-argentina-en","tag-debates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/407"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58188"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58193,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58188\/revisions\/58193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58188"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=58188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}